Gone...

A cadavorous figure with a placid face lay at the centre of the room. The loud lamentations, the angry screeches, the desperate pleas, and the aching disbelief that at other times would have seemed earth-shattering, then seemed to dissolve into a cold calmness- an uncanny, bitter, ethereal ocean of calmness that wanted to drown aching hearts and parch screaming throats and stealthily swallow unstoppable torrents of tears. He was slowly going farther and farther, draping over us a purple veil. He was dissolving little by little into cold silence.

In my mind's eye was a picture of the bungalow from five and a half feet above the ground, riding at a high speed singing loudly, "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Leiser", as I sat on his shoulders. He was breezy and relaxed, and had nothing more than a towel on around his waist and sang along with me, a word here, two there...

Maternal sorrow gripped his mother's heart and consumed her with physical pain. How could he go, with no sense of filial obligation to stay until her last days? How, oh how, could he be so transformed in a matter of hours? It shouldn't have been this way... something somewhere was wrong, utterly wrong.

But thus was the day. Never did anyone there want to relive that day's crack of dawn, that day's draining and numbing moments and that disconsolate nightfall. The day eventually ended, and the circle of life continued... but the day changed something in me, and perhaps in a few other people. I realised absolutely and completely, how it felt to be absolutely and completely helpless; I realised that there were things that no matter what I did, with all my love, or all my understanding, I could not change. It shocked me at first and numbed me later.

I can never embrace the casual brutality of the universe; and when I think of it... I feel minuscule.